As the housing market continues to fold like a cheap accordion, middle-class Americans are ever more helpless to stop the tragic end to retirement plans made years, and even decades, ago, or to reverse the relentless purging of hundreds of billions of dollars of American equity once assumed to be beyond reproach in the safety of real estate investment.
Yet while tens of millions of ordinary Americans suffer major, life-changing losses, executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prosper as though the hay days of the real estate boom were all in the future.
As reported at the reference, in part:
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the government regulator for Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac], approved $12.79 million in bonus pay after 10 executives from the two government-sponsored corporations last year met modest performance targets tied to modifying mortgages in jeopardy of foreclosure.Someone please answer The burning question: With Americans being forced out of their homes in record numbers, while Fannie and Freddie Mac executives romp in obscene profit, whither the “Occupy Wall Street” renegades?
The executives got the bonuses about two years after the federally backed mortgage giants received nearly $170 billion in taxpayer bailouts — and despite pledges by FHFA, the office tasked with keeping them solvent, that it would adjust the level of CEO-level pay after critics slammed huge compensation packages paid out to former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and others.
Freddie chief Charles “Ed” Haldeman, who recently announced plans to leave the housing finance agency next year, received a $2.3 million bonus for 2010, along with a base salary of $900,000. The top five execs at Freddie got a total of $6.5 million in performance-based pay for 2010 — and they may get more. That figure doesn’t include a second round of bonuses the execs may receive. Over at Fannie, CEO Michael Williams’s bonus last year came to $2.4 million, while the company’s top five officers got combined performance-based pay of $6.3 million.”
